Kennedy: The unholy alliance between state and tech
Apple's Tim Cook was spittin' mad in Brussels as he tore into his rabid rivals at Facebook and Google who are peeping into your business and selling you out like a neighborhood ho. Cook, repurposing a phrase from old Ike, called the shady enterprise a "data industrial complex".
Zuck and Googs have made a tidy industry off of your data, and now Tim Cook is fighting to put his worm in your apple.
While touting *his* company's beefy and bolstered new security measures, Timmy time turned into a flushed fanboy as he raved about Europe's new privacy laws, the GDPR, and how he hope these United States will follow suit.
While I applaud Cook's natural inclination to preserve privacy and thus liberty, which is implied in several amendments especially the first and fourth, it is this special insidious cronyism that has developed between big tech and big government that's worrisome.
Silicon Valley is a grab bag for sticky fingered politicians who are more than happy to steal your wealth to insure their power, and if they're on the take and beholden to hoodie-wrapped millennial billionaires why wouldn't they let this technocratic pentaverate fiddle with the legislative nib? That's how cronyism works, just look at the history of liberty-destroying public unions to see how quickly such systems corrupt themselves.
Also, tech companies who wield that much power and influence shouldn't have to be told what to do, and a new series of laws shouldn't need crafting when they invent new ways to thieve and lie. It's not right to steal and sell information, and who's to say Facebook isn't buying favor to stay in Uncle Sam's good graces? Tech companies will shamelessly work with government to help the feds streamline what they already do so clumsily: take your stuff.
Tech will always be ahead of government, and they should use that advantage to bolster the lives and experiences of individuals, and not to boost their unholy alliance with the bumbling and corruptable state.